


Wrestling with the Angel

by Miss_Femm



Category: Pinocchio (1940)
Genre: F/M, Grief, OC death, Prequel, introspective, loss of a child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 08:50:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15926996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_Femm/pseuds/Miss_Femm
Summary: Geppetto is not immune to bitterness and grief, though he's done his best to keep them at bay. (Pre-canon, introspective.)





	Wrestling with the Angel

Geppetto watches parents with their children as they pass his shop in the afternoons. The little ones press their faces against the window, straining their eyes to take in everything. It is a familiar sight, one that normally brings him joy, though there are days where melancholy washes over his heart and he cannot help but feel a pang of envy as he sees happy families pass through.

Geppetto tries not to be bitter about the way things have turned out. In many ways, he feels it was all his fault, in the end. It wasn’t that he couldn’t have remarried after Luccia passed away. He’d been made a widower at the relatively young age of thirty-three and while he was not a rich man nor the handsomest, he could have found a second match, had he tried again. But somehow, he couldn’t bear the thought. When Luccia’s fragile body had been committed to the earth, still carrying his nameless child within, something of Geppetto went with her. It could never be “till death do us part” with him; he would be eternally faithful.

Geppetto became a recluse early and that hasn’t changed. He’s friendly to customers and to the few friends who pay him a call. No one who ever knew him has had an evil thing to say against his character or his work. Yet when it comes to the outside world, he only ever bothers with the necessities. The workshop is his world entire, a place of warmth and security, inhabited by his pets and wooden creations. Sometimes he’ll look out the window and see wagons rush by too quickly—then he remembers Luccia’s screaming, the blood on the cobblestones, and shuddering, he retreats further into the shop for a moment, where the air is silent and still.

He is not frightened of the outside, despite what some think—he attends Mass once a week, does his shopping in the market, even has a drink at the tavern on New Year’s Eve should the fancy strike him. He even owns a boat and fishes in the summertime. However, sometimes being in a public place emphasizes his loneliness, reminds him of the family he lost as a child when his parents fell ill, reminds him of the family denied him when Luccia stepped into the busy street at the worst possible moment, so at the workshop he spends the lion’s share of his days.

Still, it does not pay to be bitter. Geppetto has wrestled bitterness like Jacob with the angel: he is bruised but not beaten, and commits himself to making others happy through his craftsmanship. To make a child smile with a toy or make a grown-up chuckle at one of his odd clocks gives his existence meaning enough.

As he carves and paints his current creation, a puppet of a little boy, he gives it Luccia’s blue eyes, her raven hair. As he works, sometimes he imagines what their child might have been like, had it been given a chance to live. Boy or girl—it wouldn’t have mattered to him. He would have spoiled either. In terms of character, he wonders if the child would have taken after him or his mischievous, vivacious wife. The speculation makes him a little sad for what can never be, but in a way, it is comforting, to dream and then share his dream with whatever child will one day take this puppet home as a friend.

No, it never hurts to dream….


End file.
